Availability: Public consultation data

To what extent is public consultation information available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Increasingly, countries draw on public consultation processes to inform law- and rulemaking. In practice, not all implementations of these processes have lived up to expectations. This indicator focuses specifically on the availability of data that public consultation processes for executive rulemaking—including regulations, bylaws, and rules, sometimes known collectively as secondary legislation—generate.

Such data includes the relevant regulations and comments themselves as well as administrative data regarding the performance of a country's public consultation processes. Such administrative data may be required by law or simply provided by governments as part of good practice.

To assess the performance of a public consultation process, data should include notice of intent, comments, and the various drafts of the regulation under consultation, as well as information on: number of comments submitted; the provision of reasoned responses; and challenges to regulations that have undergone public consultation processes and the results of these challenges.

Note: Countries may also use public consultation processes in conjunction with parliamentary legislation or proposed projects, particularly extractive projects with likely environmental impacts. This indicator focuses first and foremost on the data made available in conjunction with public consultations for rulemaking.

Research Guidance

If your country doesn't use public consultation processes in conjunction with regulatory matters, but does for projects or parliamentary legislation, please explain this briefly in the indicator's justification box and assess here the dataset that applies to project-based or legislative public consultation.

In some countries, national public consultation processes for rulemaking are run through a unified system, while in others such processes are run by individual executive agencies. If there are multiple forms of public consultation processes operating under different frameworks, you should focus your assessment on the most common domestic form. If there are notable variations in the assessment you would make for other common forms of public consultation processes, please briefly note this in the justification box.

Starting points

• Sources:
  • Reports published by a broader registrar's office, reports from individual agencies that engage with public consultation processes. (Note: some countries provide different sets of data through a broader registrar's office and individual agencies.)
  • National statistical offices or the appropriate governmental agency that houses statistical information.
• Consult:
  • Government officials who manage public consultation processes for their agency or department.
  • Officers of civil society organizations that actively mobilize public comments.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• What information does the data provide? For example, does it include notice of intent, proposed regulations, public comments, reasoned responses, final regulations and justification, challenges?
• Are the comments available for downloading in bulk? For example, through an API or other mechanism?
• Is there evidence of missing data, assessed first against the related governance framework, if that exists, or in the context of the datasets in front of you?
• Is there evidence that the availability of this data was affected by COVID-19?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, public consultation processes have been established by individual states, regions, or cities; consequently the data consultations generate may be published at various levels of government.

To assess countries where public consultation processes are organized sub-nationally, researchers should analyze the public consultation data associated with the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality:

• The data includes proposed regulations. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If public consultation data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where proposed regulations data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes a full set of public comments generated through public consultation processes. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Are comments available for downloading in bulk, via an API or other means?

  If Partially or Yes: If public consultation data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where public comments data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes supporting information, such as notices of intent and reasoned responses. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If public consultation data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where supporting information is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes final regulations and justifications. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If public consultation data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where final regulations data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes details of challenges to regulations that have passed through public consultation processes, as well as the results of these challenges. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If public consultation data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where challenges to regulations data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

Fundamental to democracy is the authority of the public and the involvement of the public in the act of governing, through voting as well as other forms of political participation. Public participation is well-recognized under international law as a fundamental human right, articulated in detail, for example, by the UN OHCHR in Guidelines for States on the Effective Implementation of the Right To Participate in Public Affairs (2018). Increasingly, as the OECD’s 2020 Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave details, such political participation includes public consultation in law- or rulemaking processes. Public consultation on law- or rulemaking aligns with SDG 16.7, and is a component within Transparency International’s decision-making dimension of political integrity.

As with right-to-information frameworks, public consultation frameworks fundamentally govern flows of information between members of a public and public officials. Similarly as well, it's important to collect and publish performance data on public consultation practices to assess their efficacy.

This indicator investigates the public consultation data that countries make available. It pairs with a related governance indicator to compare frameworks and actual practice.